Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789 by Julie Hardwick, and: The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic by Karen Hollewand (review).

Beverland would therefore probably agree with Hardwick's view that these legal instruments empowered early modern women. Beverland's writing was already halfway to the potent admixture of philosophical sophistication and gratuitous pornography of I Thérèse Philosophe i (1748), and in her conclusion Hollewand traces how Beverland's ideas reverberated through Mandeville and Argens into the eighteenth century. Maybe the social history of sexuality could illuminate Beverland's outrageous libertinism; yet by surveying the sexual lives of university students in early modern Leiden, Hollewand finds that Beverland's behavior was consistent with that of other rambunctious young scholars. And only with a clear picture of young women's social agency and of urban cultures of mutual aid, such as those revealed in Hardwick's study, does the extent of Beverland's chauvinism become clear. [Extracted from the article]